Javier Soltero, CTO of SaaS and application services for VMware, revealed during the CloudBeat conference that his organization has stopped issuing corporate phones and asked its 10,000 workers to bring their own devices a few weeks ago. The EMC virtualization subsidiary is the latest IT organization to acknowledge the advantages of the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) option in the modern workspace, and took another step by adopting it.

Soletro described management’s take on the switch during his speech:

“The rapid adoption of tablets and smartphones clearly means that employees have a different type of computer,” Soltero said. “The point of the post-PC era is that we’re working a little differently; we’re not tethered to a desk … and there’s got to be room for digital devices to lead that transformation.”

In the same keynote, he shrugged off the possibility of a bigger potential for security issues, crediting his view to the level of control enterprise device management tools can give the admin should such an issue surface. VMware’s new Horizon Mobile Manager serves the exact same purpose, a piece of software that virtualizes the worker’s phone to separate their ‘private space’ from a second, corporate-managed environment.

Another IT solutions provider that took the opportunity to launch some new products alongside its own adoption of BYOD is IBM.  It’s pulling it off on a much larger scale, with the goal of enabling a 50 percent of its workforce – about 200,000 employees – to bring their Android or iProducts of their choice by the end of 2012. Throughout this period the company will be introducing additional software to help companies carry out similar initiatives of their own.

Not surprisingly, this market has become much more competitive in recent months.  Earlier this week RIM expanded its platform by announcing the BlackBerry Mobile Fusion platform (which supports iOS and Android in addition to BlackBerry.)